FROM The Young Generation to a ground-breaking new documentary, Nigel, 65, is hopelessly devoted to dance – as he tells Pauline McLeod

This photograph of the BBC’s Young Generation dance troupe brings back incredible memories. It was 1969 and the start of my career in television.

I’m right in the middle of the photo with Lesley Judd, who would go on to become a Blue Peter presenter.

I remember doing a routine with Lesley to accompany Dusty Springfield singing The Look of Love. We had this really difficult lift during the middle of it. Dusty kept wanting to go over the song again and again, which left me eventually being totally exhausted and covered in bruises.

I’ve come full circle back to dancing. You could say my life’s a bit like a dance sandwich

Nigel Lythgoe

To the left of me in this photo is Ricky Stratful, who was my flatmate at the time. He took me in when I moved from Liverpool to London and got me the audition to join Young Generation. He later became a producer/director in New Zealand and invited me over in 1978 to choreograph a show about one of my heroes, Gene Kelly.

That was an incredible experience – Gene was lovely and obviously very knowledgeable. He’d also done his homework and knew my wife Bonnie’s name when we met. It made her feel like a million dollars. I met her when she joined Young Generation at the time I started choreographing the troupe in 1971.

I loved to dance as a kid, but it’s too painful to do it for pleasure these days. My knees are good, but I have a titanium plate in the back of my neck from throwing my head around in the 60s and 70s. Plus, I had another little episode [Nigel suffered a heart attack in 2003], so now I have a pacemaker and a defibrillator.

S MAG

'I’ve come full circle back to dancing. You could say my life’s a bit like a dance sandwich'

Around the time this picture was taken, when I was a young dancer, we all realised the best-looking girls were at the dancing school. Because we had to hold the girls’ hands in ballroom dancing, we could get to know them more easily than, say, meeting them in a club.

It built bridges between the sexes.

The film documentary that I’ve been working on also builds bridges – this time between Jewish and Arab kids. It’s called Dancing in Jaffa and I wanted to be involved with it because it’s about everything I believe in – which is that dance brings people together.

I gave up dance years ago to go into TV production, then took over at LWT, then I worked on Gladiators, Popstars, Pop Idol and then American Idol. Now I’ve come full circle back to dancing. You could say my life’s a bit like a dance sandwich.

I’ve always been competitive. As a dancer you need to have strong self-belief because you audition for every single thing you do. When I was a judge on Popstars I was nicknamed Nasty Nigel. I never thought I was nasty, though – just honest – but I think it was the first time anyone had been told on air that they’re not good enough and they couldn’t actually sing. There’s no point in sugar-coating it. It’s like when Simon Cowell asked a girl on air if she had a singing teacher and when she replied that she did, he retorted, ‘Get your money back!’”